They should post a detailled description of music they want (or the start of the musixtexcode) en then ask a guru to translate in pmx. Once made the first code it becomes all (very) simple. Yes, that's been my experience too, first with MusiXTeX, then with M-Tx. It's hard to learn how to do new things in these languages, but once you learn the tricks it's easy. I suspect the real problem is not enough *isolated* examples. There are several sample pieces given, but it's hard to figure out the exact details from the language specification and examples alone. Luckily for us novices, the language developers and several more experienced users are available on this mailing list. People ask me why i use musixtex or pmx and not a wysiwyg programm. The answer is: I have no reason, but its fascinating. And i have not seen a more perfect output as with musixtex. I tried using a wysiwyg program once. It was slow. Maybe there are better wysiwyg's out there now than the first one I tried (Somethingorother Composer Deluxe, on a Macintosh). But it just didn't have much support for lyrics -- I had to position them by hand. My belief is that it's easier to learn a wysiwyg program -- at least for simple things -- but much harder to do really complex things. And you can *always* type faster than you can mouse. That's the real disadvantage of every wysiwyg program I've ever used (except word processors, some of which can be quite nice). If you have much work to do, you can do it much faster with a keyboard than with a mouse. When I work with Visual C++, I do simple tasks (and debugging) with the built-in editor provided by Microsoft. But if I'm at the beginning of writing a program, or making extensive changes, I switch over to a good text editor (like vi or emacs). It's just a lot easier and faster that way. If anybody ever figures out a nice way to represent drawings (nice rectangular drawings like flowcharts and entity-relationship diagrams) in text, I may abandon the mouse altogether. In terms of typesetting music, MusiXTeX and its preprocessors (PMX and M-Tx) are a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
